News Links for:
2011

Watson, the reigning jeopardy champ, is smart, but it's still recognizably a computer. This new stuff is something completely different. IBM is setting out to build an electronic brain from the ground up.

"While technological progress may cause workers with out-dated skills to become redundant, the past two centuries have shown that the idea that increasing productivity leads axiomatically to widespread unemployment is nonsense."

By using a projector to beam the 3D image of a face onto the back of a plastic mask, and a computer to control voice and facial expressions, the researchers have succeeded in creating Mask-bot, a startlingly human-like plastic head.

"As part of my PhD topic we are studying the way birds make use of wind energy to fly with minimum power, the way they glide and use all types of wind to move and change their flight path. We're developing a UAV with artificial intelligence to forecast solar intensity and use wind patterns for path planning and to power the UAV..."

Researchers at Keio University in Japan have built Telesar, a "telexistence robot" that can be a full-fledged avatar for a human. It's controlled by a human through a 3D head-mounted display, and is finely tuned to allow the operator to see and hear exactly as they normally would...

"...in a surprising discovery, the researchers found that computationally, bacteria actually have superior survival tactics, finding 'food' and avoiding harm more easily than swarms such as amoeba or fish. Their secret? A liberal amount of self-confidence..."

"The scheme behind Robotany requires that we ask the user to describe what the AI should do in just a few example situations, and our algorithm deduces the rest," says GAMBIT Game Lab's Andrew Grant. "In essence, when faced with something the user hasn't described, the algorithm finds a similar situation that the user did specify, and goes with that."

Computer scientists from Sweden and the United States have applied modern-day, statistical translation techniques — the sort of which are used in Google Translate — to decode a 250-year-old secret message.

It turns out that getting a robot to ride a bicycle doesn't need to involve much more than a hobby level humanoid employing a relatively simple gyroscope that sends steering commands to keep things generally upright...

An older article, but still a good read: "The cities of the future will be huge and super-dense — but will they also be alive? Could the increasingly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence?"

"We are trying to replicate some of the features of primate cortex to see whether we can solve a certain set of problems in learning and intelligence," noted Livingston. "One of the big problems in robotics is building general purpose intelligence."

"I believe as artificial intelligence advances, a new model – 'software as collaborator' - will become possible, with tremendous potential benefits... Software collaborators could be designed to be enough like people that mutual adaptation is possible, and that we can understand and trust their contributions."

"The genius of Siri is to combine the new type of information bot with the old type of human-helper bot. Instead of patterning Siri on a humanoid body, Apple used a human archetype — the secretary or assistant..."

In line with the predictions of science fiction, computers are getting smarter. Now, scientists are on the way to devising a test to ascertain how close Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming to matching wits with us, and if it's drawing ahead.

Cornell's Ashutosh Saxena is teaching robots to manipulate objects and find their way around in new environments. "We just show the robot some examples and it learns to generalize the placing strategies and applies them to objects that were not seen before...,"

...we discovered that there was an entry in the Guinness World Records for largest networked Chess AI at 2070 nodes, we realized it was definitely something we could beat. The Chess@home project was born!

The Cleverbot test took place at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India. Thirty volunteers conducted a typed 4-minute conversation with an unknown entity. Half of the volunteers spoke to humans while the rest chatted with Cleverbot...

The research team has built its first brain-like computing units, with 256 neurons, 65,536 synapses, and 256 axons. It has the basic building blocks of processor, memory, and communications. This unit, can be built with just a few million transistors...

Researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology have developed a robot that's capable of walking on water. "The microrobot was supported by ten superhydrophobic artificial legs and driven by two actuating legs that connected to two miniature dc motors..."

Electrical engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta want to create smart roving exit signs. Researchers suggest that evacuation robots could guide people to the nearest exit, seek out stragglers and alert emergency services to the whereabouts of people who are injured or trapped...

Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig's CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. For the first time, you can take this course, along with several hundred Stanford undergrads, without having to fill out an application, pay tuition, or live in a dorm.

"Yesterday (July 30, 2011), Foxconn announced (at an employee dance party of all places) that they're planning on buying some robots to replace their human workforce..., Until recently, you'd probably never heard of Foxconn, but a series of worker suicides made us all take a hard look at where our electronics were coming from. Foxconn has made some improvements (including nets around tall buildings)... " -- talk about clueless CEOs.

Using a technology called a self-replicating neural network, or SOINN(Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network), it can think as humans do when taking on tasks that it has never done before. It can make educated guesses and decisions based on it's past experiences and knowledge...

This isn't the first step towards robots replacing human doctors or anything, but if there's a specialist that you want to see who lives across the country, telepresence is far more effective than a phone call...

Purdue University student has decided that his summer robotics research project is going to be teaching a robot to play DDR, which is so far looking to be an entirely possible task, with the help of a slick custom robots-only dance pad...

The program will create a visual representation of a crowd, modelling it as a group of many individual 'agents' instead of as a single mass of people, and giving each agent its own goals and behaviour...

"If they enter a casino and try to play, a computer program will compare their face with the picture bank..., If it comes up with a match, the computer dispatches security to toss out the problem gambler."

Video: Robot seals are being used to comfort earthquake and tsunami refugees in Japan. The robots have sensors and an artificial intelligence system that allows them to react when being touched or spoken to...

Interview with Daniel H. Wilson, author of the bestselling novel "Robopocalypse". A veteran of the Carnegie Mellon University robotics lab, he earned a doctorate in robotics as well as a master's degree in machine learning.

An interview that explores the key points of Wallach's speech at Yale's Technology and Ethics Seminar. He worked with Stan Franklin on his LIDA model for artificial general intelligence. He, Franklin and Colin Allen researched how LIDA might make moral decisions and what role consciousness plays in the making of those decisions.

...a team from Delft University of Technology and Philips Research in the Netherlands decided to take a look at how people actually want their robot vacuums to behave, and what kinds of personalities they'd like them to display...

It is not just dogs that engineers are copying now, but shrews complete with whiskers, swimming lampreys, grasping octopuses, climbing lizards and burrowing clams. They are even trying to mimic insects, by making robots that take off when they flap their wings...

Cleverbot, an Artificial Intelligence computer program developed by Icogno Founder Rollo Carpenter in 1988 and released to the masses in 1997, "learns" from Internet users. Everything that is put into the program is catalogued and eventually repeated as a response. But, are internet users the best caregivers for an A.I.?

"Robots are not the enemy. It's low-cost labor that's the enemy. If you want to look at where jobs are going, it's not robots taking people's jobs; it's entire companies and industries moving overseas."

When the researchers augmented a machine-learning system so that it could use a player's manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy, its rate of victory jumped from 46 percent to 79 percent...

Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and perception would be revolutionary, researchers say, with applications stretching from care for the elderly to returning overseas manufacturing operations to the United States...

The artificial skin is composed of small, rigid hexagonal circuit boards. Each circuit board has four infrared sensors that detect anything that comes closer than a centimeter, effectively stimulating light touch.

Coburn criticizes the NSF for squandering "millions of dollars on wasteful projects," including three that involve robots. "A dollar lost to mismanagement, fraud, inefficiency, or a dumb project is a dollar that could have advanced scientific discovery," the report says.

President Barack Obama loves robots. He's invited bots to the White House and has even befriended a Japanese android. But now Obama has gone one step further: He's decided to lead what may be a profound robotics revolution.

"...when we become capable of creating beings more intelligent than us, it stands to reason that they — or their near-descendants — will be able to create intelligences more intelligent than themselves..."

Developed by Na Cheng and colleagues at the Stevens Institute of Technology, the ever-improving software could soon be revealing the gender of online writers – whether they are blogging, emailing, writing on Facebook or tweeting.

Roboticists have developed tools to create a map of a robot's environment, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But they were too expensive, bulky or inaccurate. Now there's the Kinect; an affordable, lightweight camera that can capture 3-D images in real time...

As of this morning (June 16, 2011), the SDK is officially available for download – at no cost – from Microsoft Research. It provides access to Kinect's "raw sensor streams" - which means developers can work with the high speed skeletal tracking capabilities, depth sensor, color camera sensor and the microphone array...

Video: Engineers from Georgia Tech, the University of Pennsylvania and Cal Tech have now developed an entire fleet of autonomous rescue vehicles, capable of simultaneously mapping and exploring potentially dangerous buildings...

Metal corkscrews are great for opening wine, but who would think they'd also work well as wheels? In his spare time, engineer Tim Lexen built an omnidirectional, all-terrain rover with corkscrew "wheels."

Video: In this recently released TED talk, Dennis Hong from VirginiaTech presents all the recent developments of his RoMeLa Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory and also the aim of developing a car that could be driven safely by a blind driver.

A new ATM for a Russian bank turns money machines into truth machines, using fingerprint recognition, 3-D face scans and voice analysis to determine whether customers are worthy of applying for credit cards.

"In Facebook's desire to promote photo sharing and tagging among its users, it appears to have overlooked a critical component of consumer privacy protection -- an opt-in requiring users to affirmatively consent...,"

...more progress must be made to achieve the long-term goal of "intelligent transportation": cars that can "see" and communicate with other vehicles on the road, making them able to prevent crashes virtually 100 percent of the time...

Everyone loves a few rounds of a classic video game, but why should humans have all the fun? The Ms Pac-Man vs Ghost Team Competition serves to redress the balance by putting AI controllers in charge of video game characters in an effort to see which plays the game best.

People have programmed PR2s to do all sorts of fun things, but most of these things are human-y fun, not robot fun. Georgia Tech has built what they're calling a "PR2 Playpen," which is designed to keep their PR2 busy (and entertained?)...

Don't believe everything you see in the movies. Computers are vast repositories of human knowledge, and can follow complex instructions, but the missing parts prevent software programs from achieving true intelligence...

...while humans continue to define the do's and don'ts of online lust, a new generation of computer programs may have already figured it out. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, a scandal like Anthony Weiner's doesn't even necessarily need two humans anymore...

Following his talk at the recent 2011 Transhumanism Meets Design Conference in New York City, Dr. Goertzel explores fundamental issues that bridge AI, robotics, cyborgics, virtual world and game design, sociology and psychology and other areas.

This idea - a human assembly line overseen by a silicon supervisor - may change the way we work. Farming out minor tasks such as image-labelling to the crowd is now commonplace, and it looks like far more complex operations are on the way...

A team of autonomous underwater robots played a crucial role in locating debris and missing bodies from Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean almost two years ago with 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board while traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris...

A family of giant robots is now counting and processing medications for patients at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center. Believed by UCSF to be the nation's most comprehensive, should improve patient safety.

MIT computer scientists are tackling the problem with a hierarchical, progressive algorithm that has the potential to greatly reduce the computational cost associated with performing complex actions...

Participants of the Future of Humanity Institute's 2011 Winter Intelligence conference were asked the following question: How positive or negative are the ultimate consequences of the creation of a human-level (and beyond human-level) machine intelligence likely be?

Efforts to make the web more accessible have unwittingly made it less secure, according to computer scientists who have developed software to crack the audio CAPTCHAs used by websites as part of their sign-up process.

Researchers from Tufts University, Massachusetts design a robot that mimics the behavior of caterpillars that rapidly curl themselves into a wheel and propel themselves away from predators. This highly dynamic process, called ballistic rolling, is one of the fastest wheeling behaviors in nature.

Using simple robots to simulate genetic evolution over hundreds of generations, Swiss scientists provide quantitative proof of kin selection and shed light on one of the most enduring puzzles in biology: Why do most social animals, including humans, go out of their way to help each other?

"Dumb machines like cars, dishwashers, etc, can be controlled. Intelligent machines like science fiction robots or AI computers cannot. The Three Laws of Robotics are a myth, and a dangerous one.... Apologies to Hanson, Breazeal, Yudkowsky and SIAI for paraphrasing their complex philosophies so succinctly, but these people are essentially saying intelligent machines can be okay as long as they like us..."

What the Kiva warehouses have done is convert a classically serial process (boxes snaking along a sequential route) to a "massive parallel processing engine" to move the inventory simultaneously through a building and bring it right to a human worker...

Australian researchers are teaching a pair of robots to communicate linguistically like humans by inventing new spoken words, a lexicon that the roboticists can teach to other robots to generate an entirely new language...

It is by no means the first robot able to do this, but its arboreal predecessors (RiSE and Modsnake and accidentally PackBot are just a few) weren't autonomous and didn't have the skills necessary to negotiate the complex network of branches that you tend to find on trees worth climbing...

Denise Herznig and researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a machine equipped with a computer program that, in theory, will enable researchers to communicate with dolphins and possibly learn the rudiments of dolphin language...

StrainBrain.com applies artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to cannabis, allowing anyone to receive detailed strain information and find a place to purchase it legally – just by uploading a picture...

The central theme of "Brains, Minds and Machines" — the last of a series of symposia celebrating MIT's 150th anniversary — is that it's time for artificial-intelligence research, cognitive science and neuroscience to get ambitious again...

During a panel discussion that kicked off MIT's Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium, panelists called for a return to the style of research that marked the early years of the field, one driven more by curiosity rather than narrow applications...

...John Koza, who has pioneered their use in engineering design. He has "bred" designs for efficient radio antennas this way. What's really interesting, he says, is that it is not always clear why the evolved invention works: no human would have come up with his antenna's weird, zigzag shape...

Chloe Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, computer scientists from the University of Washington, have created a software program capable of giving computers a sense of humor and the ability to understand a specific type of double entendre.

Back in 2006, when Bill Gates was making his tear-filled transition from the PC industry into a tear-filled career as a philanthropist, he penned an editorial on robotics that became a rallying cry for… no one.

New developments in artificial intelligence like the one Watson displayed raises the bar for business intelligence solutions of the future, says Manthan Systems, a leading producer of retail business intelligence, in a special report.

"...I think this both poses some interesting questions but also illustrates some of the inherent absurdities of the very concept of general artificial intelligence that is sentient poses. The thing about an artificial intelligence, presuming that it's computer-based, is that at some level, it's inherently going to be programmed...."

"...Whereas other published research views obstacles and empty spaces as complementary concepts, this research assumes that, rather than being complements, obstacles and vacant spaces are a pair of opposites..."

In order to look at trimming costs when it comes to rockets, researchers in Japan are looking to create a "smart" rocket. With the use of artificial intelligence, they hope to create a rocket that can diagnose, and in some cases even repair, its own system malfunctions.

Video: A new lifelike seagull 'bot is one of the most realistic bio-inspired flight machines we've seen. SmartBird takes off, flies and lands on its own, flapping its wings and turning its head and tail to steer...

David E. Rumelhart, whose computer simulations of perception gave scientists some of the first testable models of neural processing and proved helpful in the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence, died Sunday in Chelsea, Mich.

Face.com and Google Inc.'s Like.com provide facial-recognition tools that enable users to search through digital photos. But new stealthy start-up Vicarious Systems intends to go much further with its artificial intelligence software.

"...A device capable of recognizing a user's frustration and addressing it could make workers more efficient, and mean fewer broken monitors. 'What if your computer could apologize to you?' he says..."

Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy! are often the most critical junctures of a Jeopardy! game; the amount wagered can make a big difference in a player's overall chances to win. How does Watson decide on the amount?

"...I decided to dig a little deep and get past the jargon as I think it's an increasingly important field and will help unlock the potential for natural user interfaces and technology that anticipates our needs and feels more human..."

As part of the European project RoboEarth, I am currently one of about 30 people working towards building an Internet for robots: a worldwide, open-source platform that allows any robot with a network connection to...

It's not the hardware that makes the evil robot one of western culture's most powerful myths. It's the software—namely the artificial intelligence—that turns machines into monsters. Here is a timeline with the most iconic examples of malevolent AI and the fears each inspired...

What does 2011 hold for the field of robotics? Plenty, if 2010 is any indication. This will not be the year that mobile, artificially intelligent robot nurses assume the responsibility of caring for the world's growing elderly population...

A humanoid robot has just emulated Neil Armstrong's "giant leap" – though only in a simulation. It's one small step towards developing a robot that can handle the unusual challenges of walking on the moon...

In a new Cognitive Robotics Lab, students at Rensselaer are exploring how human thought outwits brute force computing in the real world. The lab's 20 programmable robots allow students to test the real-world performance of computer models that mimic human thought...

We can identify three major kinds of reasoning: deductive (which only proceeds "downhill or sideways" from given premises), inductive (which cautiously may proceed "uphill" – from observations to general principles – under certain conditions) and abductive (which merrily jumps to conclusions even on insufficient evidence)...